The same deep water as you

Whether it falls from the sky, rises from below or trickles down a cheek, there is no end to anxiety prompted by water in Beasts of the Southern Wild. This already wildly acclaimed and awarded debut feature from American director and co-scenarist Ben Zeitlin is set in a marshy lowland called the Bathtub, where boisterous survivors of some disaster, all poor or working class to begin with, make do with what meager supplies they can access (which apparently includes a lot of beer).

Echoes of Katrina ripple unambiguously though the film, but the voice we hear reflecting upon all this chaos is that of a girl too young to even remember the hurricane that ate Louisiana. Her name is Hushpuppy (Quevenzhane Wallis) and at six she’s already fierce and resourceful in her dirty white rubber boots, water wings and fecund mane. “I’m recording my story for the scientists of the future,” she tells us. Her father Wink (Dwight Henry) is awfully sick with something or other, usually drunk and at least half-crazy. At his most Quixote-like he attacks a nocturnal storm with shotgun. Her mother’s long-gone, though her ghost speaks to Hushpuppy through an old basketball jersey. Hushpuppy is haunted by visions of collapsing ice caps and giant boars of the Apocalypse crashing through towns. She knows it’s the end times but she’s already set her sights on a new beginning. She and Wink and a handful of their friends scoff at the authorities that have apparently forsaken them, focusing instead on creating the world afresh from what they can see and touch.

The solidarity between blacks and white, adults and children, the cultivated naiveté and the quietly epic quality to this narrative about a weary father and his progeny traversing a dying landscape tempt one to sum up Beasts of the Southern Wild as George Washington meets The Road, though the mash-up comparison doesn’t do favours for any of the works in question. To Zeitlin’s credit, this film has its own singular ambitions, and frankly lacks the very different sorts of funk and aesthetic rigour of either of its noted cinematic kin. It has an amazing sequence in which four little girls are welcomed into a floating brothel. It’s like something out of Apocalypse Now. Or maybe The Odyssey. But there are also many scenes that feel oddly schematic and yet somehow directionless. Zeitlin was raised by folklorists, and balancing folklore with naturalism is a trick that can stump more experienced filmmakers.

Beasts of the Southern Wild is at once extraordinary and sort of disappointing. Extraordinary because it brings myth, colour and adventure even to a woefully neglected region and people of the United States and a shared trauma still so fresh in our memory. Disappointing because its overbearing score (co-composed by Zeitlin) is so determined to not let five minutes pass without a flood of stoic uplift, because Wallis’ angry pout gradually pushes the limits of precociousness, while Henry’s blustery performance just pushes period (I like both actors very much, but they’re too often hitting the same note); because a story such as this one, shaped around a child’s experience, should leave more room for wonder and retain a more heightened sensitivity to nature and accident. I don’t mean to rain on Zeitlin’s well-earned parade, it’s just that, like Hushpuppy, I can imagine bigger and better things a-coming. 

What remains: The Road

The images that open The Road feature a leaf-lined branch warmed by the sun. Somewhere nearby stands a beautiful mother-to-be. Observing her is a handsome man stroking a horse. These fragments of a becalmed pastoral paradise are fleeting, vanishing as that same man wakes from his memory-laden dream. A handful of years have passed, perhaps seven, judging from the age of the boy who accompanies him, but the man appears to have aged decades, his face lined with grime-streaked gutters, his teeth half-rotted. Still, his transformation is nothing compared to that of the world he inhabits. The topography resembles a five-day beard on a wretched old man. Fires line the horizon, the sky’s an endless gloaming, and the colour green has forsaken us. Food is scarce, earthquakes are frequent, and what’s left of mankind has largely been reduced to foraging ghouls. At least there are still books. The man reads one to the boy. It catalogues animals, each of which is now presumed extinct.

The man (Viggo Mortensen) and boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) are making their way south, on foot, in beat-to-shit puffy coats, with dwindling supplies and a revolver with two bullets left, just enough to ensure double-suicide should some horrendous murder suddenly become a certainty. Those aching memories of fecund nature and familial blossoming are the last vestiges of warmth and beauty available to them, though the dying landscapes they pass through possess an undeniable fascination, at least for those of us just visiting for a couple of hours. The most commonplace items become miraculous here: shampoo, Coke, toothpaste, a can of pears. Their magic is intensified by the boy’s first-ever discovery of their comforts—he was born into this. The preservation of his innocence is all the man lives for, his answer to the question of why go on. His wife opted for suicide, along with most people with sense or dignity.

The book is from Cormac McCarthy, author of All the Pretty Horses, Blood Meridian and No Country For Old Men. Like No Country, The Road is a kind of western, the man with no name charged with chaperoning the boy through lawless terrain, their destination being the Gulf Coast and its vague promise of less hostile conditions for homesteading. Like the Coen Brothers’ film of No Country, The Road, scripted by Joe Penhall, is an unusually faithful literary adaptation, and director John Hillcoat, who last helmed The Proposition, easily one of the best westerns of the decade, offers a realization of McCarthy’s post-apocalypse that’s richly detailed, surprisingly suspenseful, and hauntingly vivid. A notable difference between the films of No Country and The Road however is that where the Coens nurtured atmosphere with an uncharacteristic paucity of scoring and voice-over, Hillcoat’s enlisted his old friends Nick Cave and Warren Ellis to supply the scoring, which is gorgeously mournful, so evocative as to be a sort of adaptation in itself. The problem being that there’s so much of it. Along with Mortensen’s weary voice-over—the pairing of disembodied voice and music recalls the films of Terrence Malick, The Thin Red Line in particular—the hypnotic score lulls us during scenes where we should ideally be alert to the tiniest, most nuanced sound, gesture, and image. It’s hardly the worst problem for a movie to have—an abundance of something beautiful and well crafted—but it does finally swath everything in a single tone, unintentionally protecting us from some harrowing moments.

Yet his central reservation of mine felt less important upon my second viewing of The Road, which allowed me to better forget the source material and focus more on the tremendous emotional connection between the brilliantly-cast Mortensen and the very natural, wide-eyed Smit-McPhee. During the second half I realized how, beneath the unfathomably bleak milieu, The Road is finally a story about father and son, about what a parent lives for and what a child tries to retain as he carries on alone. The accumulation of moments of desperate searching and running, of laughter and play—rare, but memorable—and of mutual learning about how to negotiate with the unruly world becomes resonant, and unforgettably moving. So see The Road, and then, perhaps, see it again. There’s something precious amidst all that darkness.

Father, son, and holy terror: Nick Cave's The Death of Bunny Munro

Nick Cave, with friend

It begins with a sudden, shuddering, wholly irrational yet undeniable awareness of encroaching doom, Nick Cave’s chronicle of a death foretold letting us in on its ending from the title on down, so we can better appreciate the particular strange, sordid path it takes to get there. The Death of Bunny Munro is Cave’s second novel, his first in the 20 years that have passed since the publication of his debut And the Ass Saw the Angel. This one could be titled And the Asshole Saw the Angel of Death. Bunny’s uncharacteristic vision of oblivion—he’s normally the optimistic type—arrives not in the midst of some serene moment of contemplation but rather in a rented room at the Grenville Hotel, where he lingers in his underwear, drunk, with a prostitute standing by as he tries to placate his wife over the phone, who’s upset because among other things a madman’s running loose somewhere in England, wearing devil’s horns, and savagely attacking women. As his wife airs her fears, Bunny can see CCTV footage of the maniac on the telly. He’s not sure what to make of the guy, but as his story unfolds, we’ll come to see the horned killer as the flamboyant manifestation of Bunny’s Id, his even darker double, deprived of the most basic social skills that even Bunny can boast of, running rampant. The men represent two different kinds of ladykiller. “Some part of Bunny takes all this personally, but he is not sure why.”

Bunny is a salesman of high-end beauty products. His favourite radio program is Woman’s Hour, which he regularly, stupidly quotes when addressing his uniformly female clientele. Virtually everything in Bunny’s life is calibrated to yield more sex. His way with the ladies is perhaps hard for some of us to understand, “but there’s a pull, even in his booze-blasted face, a magnetic drag that has something to do with the pockets of compassion that form at the corners of his eyes when he smiles, a mischievous arch to his eyebrows and the little hymen-popping dimples in his cheeks when he laughs.” In short he is a devoted sexual predator, probably a genuine sex addict—rather unusually for a middle-aged man, he seems to have a hard-on all the time—and he uses whatever tools lay at his disposal to satisfy his need, which creepily enough is not so much for women per se as for their reproductive organs. Some of his buddies describe themselves as tit-men or leg-men, but Bunny is a dyed-in-the-wool vagina man. He fantasizes about vaginas, or even just clitorises, free-floating in space or collected in a little matchbox. He’s especially interested in celebrity vaginas, and has a special thing for Kylie Minogue and Avril Lavigne (who both receive special apologies in the postscript). In waves of inspired perversion and grotesquerie, Cave has accessed the murkiest, most reptilian depths of the male psyche to create this idiot monster. Not as monstrous as, say, the eponymous protagonist of ‘Stagger Lee,’ one of the most irresistibly sick songs in the mighty canon of Cave’s recording career with the Bad Seeds, but you can see how the two might get on together.

Cave, working at his day job

The novel follows Bunny from the discovery of his desperately unhappy and neglected wife’s suicide through his resolution to get right back to work selling and screwing, taking his young, helplessly dad-adoring son, little Bunny Junior, out of school and along for the road trip. What makes The Death of Bunny Munro palatable, even transcendent in its way, is firstly the brilliant, frequently hilarious wit, on par with the best early novels of Martin Amis, who’s crafted a few truly despicable protagonists of his own in his time; secondly its willingness to really sink into an explore Bunny’s sad little soul and seek out the parts of it that eerily reflect something in virtually all men; thirdly, the presence of Bunny Junior, genuinely innocent and wracked with a mixture of wonderment and grief; and fourthly, Cave’s already legendary facility with language. He’s often said that prose, as well as screenplays—he scripted John Hillcoat’s superb 2005 outback western The Proposition—are actually far easier for him to write than song lyrics, which demand a compaction that challenges Cave’s natural inclination toward storytelling, baroque description, and elaboration. His songs are littered with a dizzying array of characters immersed in private worlds of violence, madness and heartache. All three of these feature prominently in his new novel, even the latter, since, while he can hardly make any sense of it, Bunny does seem to miss his dead wife, is literally haunted by her. To say the very least, it’s tough to like Bunny, but it’s tougher not to become engrossed in his tale.

The novel was prompted by Hillcoat’s suggestion that Cave write him a new screenplay. The screenplay quickly became something else, but its origins are detectable in its engaging use of present-tense, and its forward motion. (Oddly enough, there are some fundamental similarities between this story and that of Hillcoat's new film The Road.) It’s also consumed with visuals, Bunny’s attention to minute physical details, even nail polish; Bunny Junior’s attention to all the strange things he encounters on his journey that need interpreting, usually with the aid of his trusty child’s encyclopedia; and Cave’s attention to the spoils of popular culture cluttering contemporary England. It all winds up to a bizarre, entertainingly hallucinatory finish, which also bears a certain cinematic flourish, though it reminded me most readily of the flipped-out ending of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s epic television series Berlin Alexanderplatz, which Cave is a confessed fan of. (There's even an appearance from a moustahced musician character that could be a Cave stand-in, aligning things even further to Fassbinder's hilarious cameo in the last episode of Alexanderplatz.) Cave has also said he’d like to see The Death of Bunny Munro made into a television series, something that would allow for more expansive character development. But in the meantime the novel has already spread beyond the confines of the page and can also be found as an audiobook, read by Cave, with music by Cave and Bad Seed/Dirty Three violinist Warren Ellis, and an iPhone application, in which you’re supposed to be able to actually see Cave read you the book. “Which all sounds like fucking nightmare to me,” Cave quipped at a recent bookstore appearance I managed to catch in Toronto. But that’s hardly a dissuasive sales tactic. Cave’s been serving up his nightmares for public consumption for 30 years now, and there’s a great many of us who still can’t get enough of them.

On The Road, again

The Toronto International Film Festival gets underway tomorrow, and among the most anticipated titles screening, for me and I think many others, is The Proposition director John Hillcoat's much delayed adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road, starring Viggo Mortensen. Below is a review of the novel I wrote for Vue Weekly when it initially came out a few years ago.

* * *

A man and a boy move along a wasted highway and through bush in tattered clothes, a shopping cart holding all their worldly possessions jumbled under a tarp. They carry a revolver with two bullets. They forage for hard-to-find items like food, gas and shoes, and are perpetually concerned with gathering sufficient materials to build a fire.

They head south, toward the Gulf Coast, for fear of not surviving another winter in colder terrain. The landscape they traverse is burned up, cloaked with ash, bereft of sounds of life and nearly all colour. Nights are “dark beyond darkness,” days “more gray than each one that had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.”

All around them are dead cars, dead buildings, cadavers, “shriveled and drawn like latter-day bog folk, their faces of boiled sheeting.” Other living beings are few and far between and almost always best avoided at all costs. Despair has made ghouls of most survivors, and the man vows to protect the boy at all costs, believing his life to be of some as yet undetermined but superior, even sacred value. “If he is not the word of God,” the man thinks, “God never spoke.”

This is the story, rendered in a vigorous, austere version of the author’s exalted prose, of a pilgrimage to nowhere, in a forsaken land where art, order and progress have collapsed in their meaning. With the millennium having passed, new, less abstract fears singe the surface of modern life. The Road (Knopf, $30) offers an apocalyptic vision as demonically inspired as that of Cormac McCarthy’s masterwork Blood Meridian, except that now the apocalypse is complete, ubiquitous and absolute. Perhaps ironically, in this post-world virtually absent of all hope, the goodness of the man and the boy somehow holds fast to the novel’s thread where once, in novels like Blood Meridian, evil toppled everything.

Author Cormac McCarthy

Perhaps it’s a tough sell, this short novel about a future where all is truly lost and only blind faith (such as the father’s) or ignorance (the boy was born into this destroyed world) pushes our protagonists forward into ongoing nothingness and danger. Even the memory of beauty is so painful to maintain (“He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins”) that the man chooses to discard the last photo he carries of his dead wife.
There is no direct mention of what caused the great catastrophe, but it possesses all the signs of a nuclear winter. And the death of nearly everything seems to be a worldwide phenomenon.

Yet, in the ashes of all our collective dreams, McCarthy uncovers surprising reveries of wonder and fragile pleasure: the rediscovery of Coca-Cola, the chemical beauty of a flare exploding over a pallid sea, the smoothness and delicate grace of fine china, the primitive music to be eked from a crudely constructed flute, the underground miracle of a perfectly preserved bomb shelter. And there are the exchanges between the boy and the man, who share many brief, terse but loving dialogues:

That hurt, didn’t it? the boy said.

Yes, It did.

Are you real brave?

Just medium.

McCarthy peppers The Road with a few brilliant, tense and explosively violent encounters, while in quieter scenes he mines spare poetry from simple activities and bursts of a survivalist’s necessary sense of invention. He also casts a much bigger image of the earth’s destiny that’s shot through with a detached, scientific sort of awe: “Perhaps in the world’s destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.”

But the splendour of what is lost nonetheless gets the final word, with memories of all the good things we know and take for granted rising to fill the novel’s final paragraph. McCarthy describes the brook trout that once inhabited mountain streams and his description calls the reader to see our world with clearer eyes and to grasp onto the ache of all things cherished that may soon slip away: The trout “smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of things that could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”